“I am very pleased to make this appointment, which has the strong and unanimous support of both SRC and ISR leadership,” said ISR Director James S. Jackson. “I look forward to continue developing a strong working relationship with Raghu in his challenging position leading ISR’s largest Center. And I also want to extend my sincere thanks to current SRC Director Bill Axinn who has worked tirelessly over the last 4 1/2 years to provide outstanding leadership to the Center, and to the entire SRC Situational Review Committee under the very able leadership of Jim House.”

Raghunathan will begin his five-year term as director on September 1, 2014.

“I feel extremely honored that faculty and staff have chosen me to be the Director of the best survey research institution in the world. I am looking forward to working with James and other Center Directors to reach new heights with social science modeling of Big Data” said Raghunathan. “ It is also daunting to know that I am following intellectual giants who have served as Directors, Jim House, Bob Groves and Bill Axinn”.

Raghunathan is a research professor at ISR a professor of biostatistics at the U-M School of Public Health, where he also serves as chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Associate Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health. He is also a Research Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland.

His research interests span several areas in statistics including Bayesian methods, survey design and analysis, and analytic techniques for handling missing data. He developed a widely used open-source software program called IVEWARE for handling multiple imputation analysis.

He is the author or co-author of more than 175 publications in peer-reviewed journals, on statistical methodology and subjects including cardiovascular health and cancer prevention.

Raghunathan joined U-M in 1994. He received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University in 1987, and was a faculty member in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington before coming to the U-M.

He served as Director of the Survey Methodology Program at ISR from 1997 to 2001, and continues to serve on the faculty of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland.

Raghunathan was born in Nagpur, India and received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Nagpur University. He came to the U.S. in 1982, receiving a Master’s degree in Statistics from Miami University in Oxford, OH.

He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Raghunathan was named the Richard D. Remington Lecturer by the American Heart Association in 2012.